Lately I have fallen under the spell of an East Village restaurant called Foxface. The cooking there is hard to pin down, geographically. Stopping in a few weeks ago, I ate Low Countryish wild red shrimp on grits, with sweet corn off the cob and a potent saffron-lobster sauce. More recently, I had skinless pork sausage inspired by sai ua, the spicy and tangy specialty identified with the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai. The soft tripe I enjoyed the other weekend had been simmered with ’nduja, the fiery and malleable Calabrian sausage, and then covered with a few thin shingles of shaved pecorino.
If I had started hanging around at Foxface sooner, especially during the cold months after its opening, in February, I might have run into a wider variety of cuisines and main ingredients. I did manage to get some of the elk osso buco while that was still on the menu. I never got to try the wild hare, though, stewed in red wine with a bit of chocolate and thickened with its own blood, a formula that students of very old-guard French cooking will recognize as lièvre à la royale.
Nor did I make it in time for the venison, left to bubble for hours in white wine with mushrooms and dark juniper berries. The Foxface dish I may never forgive myself for missing, though, is the kebabs served with preserved lemons and tahini, because the kebabs were made from ground lamb and camel.
Although these foods may lack any unifying cultural background, they did have one thing in common: They were all served on rolls. Apart from an occasional salad or soup, everything cooked at Foxface arrives in sandwich form. And with the exception of a muffuletta that briefly manifested a few months back, every sandwich at Foxface is filled with hot, cooked meat or seafood or vegetables.
In Mexico, certain taco stands specialize in tacos de guisado, tortillas filled with one kind of stew or another. Most of Foxface’s offerings are, in effect, sandwiches de guisado. Which reminds me of another impressive Foxface sandwich, a magenta and green tangle of cilantro stems and pickled onions pressed into an engagingly tart pile of pork, marinated in sour orange juice and roasted very slowly under a banana leaf in emulation of cochinita pibil from the Yucatán.
CreditCaitlin Ochs for The New York Times
There is no guarantee that any of these items will be available when you go to Foxface. The menu is printed daily and taped up next to the window on St. Marks Place where most of the business is transacted. Sometimes a new sandwich appears after the printed menu has already been posted, so it will be written out by hand on a card that has in its upper left corner the restaurant’s logo, a drawing of an elegant fox in cat’s-eye glasses with a cigarette holder in one gloved hand. The sandwiches have names like It’s What’s ’Nside (for the tripe with ’nduja) or 120 BPM (bison heart with tahini and “many spices”).
The Smoking Fox is sold every day. It is filled with smoked pork rib the color of a dry rosé, separated from the bones and covered with coleslaw, pickles and a few splashes of habanero-orange vinegar. Your mind, of course, goes either to Memphis or to the McRib, and neither is exactly wrong, but the meat is of a superior grade and is smoked with the attention to timing and nuance that characterizes Foxface’s cooking. It’s a great sandwich.
To place an order, you lean in to the window and speak with Sivan Lahat, who owns and runs Foxface with Ori Kushnir, her partner in life and in sandwiches. They immigrated to New York from Israel almost 20 years ago and have lived here ever since, apart from a brief flirtation with the Midwest and a longer experimental period in Tokyo. While they were in Japan, they operated a pop-up restaurant, which is the closest either of them came to running a food business before opening Foxface.
Like the fox in the logo, Ms. Lahat has coppery hair and wears cat’s-eye glasses. She prepares the orders in the room behind the window, which measures 48 square feet. Inside the building, under the stairs, Foxface has a second room. Mr. Kushnir thinks it could be as large as 14 square feet.
A variety of equipment is stowed in the two rooms, including three induction burners, a roaster, a smoker and a dishwasher. After business hours, some of it comes out as Mr. Kushnir supervises the more time-consuming roasts and stews. He describes the food that he and Ms. Lahat cook as “dishes we like to eat, reimagined as sandwiches.”
I like to eat a lot of the same dishes, as it happens, but they have been hard to come by lately, especially those shapeless brown stews that are so out of style. Following some of the world’s most influential chefs and shamed, perhaps, by the unflattering lenses of a million amateur photographers, restaurants have shifted away from plain and plain-looking cooking.
The subtlety and the thrill of plain cooking comes from searing, simmering, reducing, skimming and so on. All the people who own Instant Pots know this, but the segment of the restaurant scene with artistic leanings has forgotten it, focusing instead on plating, arranging six or seven things in some photogenic design and hoping they will cohere.
Slapping a roll on it is one way to get a shapeless brown stew ready for its close-up, although it has to be said that on the mean streets of Instagram, an elk osso buco sandwich is no match for a rainbow unicorn ice cream sundae.
Because space is at a premium, there is no room to sit and eat your Smoking Fox at Foxface itself. You can, however, take it to a table a few steps away inside an adjoining business called the William Barnacle Tavern. This is a reassuringly gloomy bar that is said to have originated as a speakeasy. Model ships and other nautical paraphernalia are strewn about, references to the rumrunning operation a former owner of the building presided over during Prohibition. (The stairs that Foxface’s dishwasher is housed below lead to an exhibition space called the Museum of the American Gangster.)
The bar’s current owner has resisted some modern conveniences. Most of the lighting at night comes from small candles, and all of the music is provided by old films — of Irish folk recitals, Cab Calloway concerts — that run in looping, watery projections on the back wall.
All Foxface sandwiches are presented in a trim little white box that can be unfolded into a place mat. You can purchase an Italian fruit soda for $3 from Foxface, or buy alcohol from the tavern. The beer is not expensive, but the specialty of the house is absinthe. Most patrons drink theirs diluted with ice water poured from a four-spigot absinthe fountain at the end of the bar.
The bartender will make absinthe cocktails, too, including the one Ernest Hemingway supposedly invented that is just absinthe and Champagne in a big glass. He called it Death in the Afternoon, and it is what I intend to drink if I ever get my hands on that camel sandwich.
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